Jef's web files - Collaboration

Collaboration

Mon, 31 May 2004 18:54:34 -0400

Collaboration

Collective intelligence, collective stupidity, and means of achieving them.

"I said, 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'"

Wed, 03 May 2006 12:07:32 -0400

"A lady said, 'What's your solution?'
I said, 'There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.'
She said, 'The people demand solutions!'
- Thomas Sowell

That Song Sounds Familiar

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 15:51:04 -0500

In the beginning, there was music. Childhood and young adulthood floated by to a soundtrack of lyrics and rhythms and searing guitar riffs that consumed you, became you, constituted your identity, galvanized your intent, spoke your soul.

But time passes, classrooms fade to cubicles, and a vast landscape of new music turns foreign and unexplored. For Jeff Hersh, 31, the stereo came to double as Proust's madeleine, its purpose to invoke memories rather than create them.

"Finding music was easier when I was younger," says Hersh, a vice president at Smith Barney in New York. "In college I lived in a fraternity house with 70 guys all around me at all times, listening to various kinds of music. But as you get older, you work more, you get isolated."

Then in November, a friend told Hersh about Pandora.com, an inventive "Internet radio" website that generates music streams — "stations" — based on one's favorite artists or songs. He started his own private thread of music that was a combination of Neil Young and Pearl Jam, Hersh says, and in an hour he heard more new music he liked than he had in the last decade, much of it from obscure bands that shared musical traits with Young and Pearl Jam.

Video Game World Gives Peace a Chance

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:41:30 -0400

Parents who worry that video games are teaching kids to settle conflicts with blasters and bloodshed can take heart: A new generation of video games wants to save the world through peace and democracy.

A team at Carnegie Mellon University is working on an educational computer game that explores the Mideast conflict -- you win by negotiating peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This spring, the United Nations' World Food Programme released an online game in which players must figure out how to feed thousands of people on a fictitious island.

This weekend, the University of Southern California is kicking off a competition to develop a game that promotes international goodwill toward the United States, a kind of Voice of America for the gamer set.

And lest anyone think only professors and policy wonks are involved, a unit of MTV this week announced a contest to come up with a video game that fights genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Internet-based computer games, in which players create characters in a virtual world and interact to solve problems or win battles, are branching out from fantasy into serious social issues. Academics recognize their power as a new form of mass entertainment, and activists hope to tap into their enormous worldwide popularity to reach a new generation used to interacting through computers.

...a million years to move from counting pebbles to the elaborations of quantum mechanics.

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 13:22:50 -0500

It took a million years to move from counting pebbles to the elaborations of quantum mechanics. Certainly this was an arduous migration of the multitude -- not a private party of physicists, but the Long March of the entire human race.
- Anonymous

Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:55:16 -0400

The tech guru sees a "new economic system" in the unconscious cooperation embodied by Google links and Amazon lists.

Howard Rheingold is on the hunt again. With his last book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, in 2001, the longtime observer of technology trends made a persuasive case that pervasive mobile communications, combined with always-on Internet connections, will produce new kinds of ad-hoc social groups. Now, he's starting to take the leap beyond smart mobs, trying to weave some threads out of such seemingly disparate developments as Web logs, open-source software development, and Google.

At the same time, Rheingold is worried that established companies could quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing -- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world. He recently spoke with Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Q: Where do you see the social revolution you've been talking about going next?

A: It's too early to say. The question is: What does it point toward? Some kind of collective action...in which the individuals aren't consciously cooperating. A market is a great example as a mechanism for determining price based on demand. People aren't saying, "I'm contributing to the market," they say they're just selling something. But it adds up.

Computers, Networks and Education

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:49:21 -0400

Globally networked, easy-to-use computers can enhance learning, but only within an educational environment that encourages students to question "facts" and seek challenges.

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has remarked that education in the 20th century is like being taken to the world's greatest restaurant and being fed the menu. He meant that representations of ideas have replaced the ideas themselves; students are taught superficially about great discoveries instead of being helped to learn deeply for themselves.

In the near future, all the representations that human beings have invented will be instantly accessible anywhere in the world on intimate, notebook-size computers. But will we be able to get from the menu to the food? Or will we no longer understand the difference between the two? Worse, will we lose even the ability to read the menu and be satisfied just to recognize that it is one?

There has always been confusion between carriers and contents. Pianists know that music is not in the piano. It begins inside human beings as special urges to communicate feelings. But many children are forced to "take piano" before their musical impulses develop; then they turn away from music for life. The piano at its best can only be an amplifier of existing feelings, bringing forth multiple notes in harmony and polyphony that the unaided voice cannot produce.

The computer is the greatest "piano" ever invented, for it is the master carrier of representations of every kind. Now there is a rush to have people, especially schoolchildren, "take computer." Computers can amplify yearnings in ways even more profound than can musical instruments. But if teachers do not nourish the romance of learning and expressing, any external mandate for a new "literacy" becomes as much a crushing burden as being forced to perform Beethoven's sonatas while having no sense of their beauty. Instant access to the world's information will probably have an effect opposite to what is hoped: students will become numb instead of enlightened.

In addition to the notion that the mere presence of computers will improve learning, several other misconceptions about learning often hinder modern education. Stronger ideas need to replace them before any teaching aid, be it a computer or pencil and paper, will be of most service. One misconception might be called the fluidic theory of education: students are empty vessels that must be given knowledge drop by drop from the full teacher-vessel. A related idea is that education is a bitter pill that can be made palatable only by sugarcoating-a view that misses the deep joy brought by learning itself.

Another mistaken view holds that humans, like other animals, have to make do only with nature's mental bricks, or innate ways of thinking, in the construction of our minds. Equally worrisome is the naive idea that reality is solely what the senses reveal. Finally, and perhaps most misguided, is the view that the mind is unitary, that it has a seamless "I"-ness. Quite the contrary. Minds are far from unitary: they consist of a patchwork of different mentalities.

A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:59:01 -0400

Hewlett-Packard's Alan Kay, who played a pivotal role in the invention of the personal computer, says business should think more creatively about the potential of technology.

I have a soft spot for people who say things like "The computer revolution hasn't started yet...we're not even close to what we should have." I'm prone to agree. But when the speaker is Alan Kay, who invented a huge proportion of what we do have today, I enthusiastically grant him credence.

This is the guy who, working for the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the late '60s and at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early '70s, invented or contributed heavily to the invention of: the personal computer, windows-type graphical user interfaces, personal computer networks, and object-oriented computer programming. All of these seminal creations are baked into today's computing environment, which Kay casually disparages. They say that great inventors are often easily dissatisfied. An hour or so with Kay would suggest there's truth in that.

Kay is now a senior fellow at HP Labs, where he continues his work. I was talking to him recently, though, because he has just been awarded an extraordinary trio of prizes—sort of a triple crown of computing—in honor of his many years of extraordinary breakthroughs. First, in February, he was one of four former PARC researchers to be given the nation's top engineering award—the Charles Stark Draper Prize—by the National Academy of Engineering. Then in April the Association for Computing Machinery gave him its Turing Award, sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." Finally, in June, he won the annual Kyoto Prize given by the Inamori Foundation of Japan, which comes with a cash award of approximately $450,000 and aims to recognize those who not only contribute to technical progress but also to "human development." This is a man with plenty of laurels to rest on.

But I was struck most by how much he thinks we haven't yet done. "We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."

But what about all those great things he invented? Aren't we getting any mileage from all that? Not nearly enough, Kay believes. For him, computers should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short. At Xerox PARC the aim of much of Kay's research was to develop systems to aid in education. But business, instead, has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."

If business users were less shortsighted, Kay says, they would seek to create computer models of their companies and constantly simulate potential changes. But the computers most business people use today are not suited for that. That's because, he says, today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "The PC has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero—but that's what it's for."

Kay also decries what he sees as a fundamental failing of the web—it is primarily an environment for displaying information, not for authoring it. "You can read a document in Microsoft Word, and write a document in Microsoft Word. But the people who did web browsers I think were too lazy to do the authoring part."

Though Kay claims he's "not trying to sound like a crab here," he does border on it, especially when shortly thereafter he asserts "pretty much everything that's believed is bullshit."

But a man like this cannot be dismissed merely because he occasionally creeps toward arrogance. What's much more important is that he does not merely complain. He has a vision and a team working to bring his alternate vision to reality. Over the past three decades Kay has worked at Apple, Atari, Disney and now Hewlett-Packard. Some of the researchers in his team have moved with him from company to company. At HP, he may have found the best fit yet. The world's second-largest computing company, it has the deepest pockets of any research outfit he's ever worked for, and far more ways to bring innovations to the market.

So what is Kay trying to build now? Nothing less than "a new way of doing objects, operating systems, and networks, that makes use of the infrastructure we already have." Kay's ultimate dream is to completely remake the way we communicate with each other. At the least, he wants to enable people to collaborate and work together simply and elegantly. For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person." In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines." In other words, a system by which anybody could connect to anybody else at any time without having to go through some server.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 15:36:03 -0400

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations

In the summer of 2003, analysts at the Department of Defense had an unusual idea. To predict important events in the world, including terrorist attacks, they would create a kind of market in which ordinary people could actually place bets. The proposed Policy Analysis Market would allow each of us to invest in our predictions about such matters as the growth of the Egyptian economy, the death of Yasir Arafat, and the likelihood of terrorist attacks in the United States. Investors would win or lose money on the basis of the accuracy of their predictions. Predictably, the Policy Analysis Market produced a storm of criticism. Ridiculed as "offensive" and "useless," the proposal was abandoned.

Amid the war on terrorism, why was the Defense Department so interested in the Policy Analysis Market? The answer is simple: it wanted to have some help in predicting geopolitical events, including those that would endanger American interests, and it believed that a market would provide that help. It speculated that if a large number of people could be given an incentive to aggregate their private information, in the way that the Policy Analysis Market would do, government officials would learn a great deal.

Does this idea seem ludicrous? Since 1988, the University of Iowa has run the Iowa Electronic Markets, which allow people to bet on the outcome of presidential elections. As a predictor, the Iowa Electronic Markets have produced extraordinarily accurate judgments, often doing better than professional polling organizations. In the week before each of the last four elections, the predictions in the Iowa market have shown an average absolute error of just 1.5 percentage points, a significant improvement over the 2.1 percentage point error in the final Gallup Polls. Or consider the Hollywood Stock Exchange, in which people predict Oscar nominees and winners, as well as opening weekend box-office successes. Here, too, the level of accuracy has been exceptionally impressive, with (for example) correct predictions of thirty-five out of forty Oscar nominees in 2002.

In fact, prediction markets are springing up all over the Internet, allowing people to make bets on the likely outcomes of sports, entertainment, finance, and political events. On tradesports.com, people have been betting on whether Donald Rumsfeld will resign soon (extremely unlikely), whether Osama bin Laden will be captured by June 2004 (extremely unlikely), whether John Edwards will be selected as John Kerry's running mate (a good chance, but probably not), and whether George W. Bush will be re-elected (more likely than not). One can imagine prediction markets on any number of questions: Will gas prices reach $3 per gallon? Will cellular life be found on Mars? Will smallpox return to the United States? Will there be a sequel to Master and Commander? Will the Federal Communications Commission be abolished? (I didn't make these up; they are actual or proposed questions on existing markets.)

James Surowiecki is fascinated by prediction markets. In his opinion, they demonstrate that crowds are often wise. He rejects the widespread view that groups of ordinary people are usually wrong--and that we do better to ignore them and follow experts instead. Even when individuals blunder, he believes, groups can excel: "Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." This is so even when "most of the people within the group are not especially well-informed or rational." What is wonderful, and surprising, is that "when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent." Instead of chasing experts, we should consult that collective intelligence.

If you want good information, ask around - a lot

Sun, 30 May 2004 13:44:34 -0400

In 1906, English scientist Francis Galton visited a country livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was about to be slaughtered, and the villagers in attendance were invited to guess the animal's weight after being slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go, and not surprisingly, no one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the average of those 800 guesses came close - very close indeed.

It was 1,197 pounds.

This anecdote captures the striking thesis of James Surowiecki's new book, "The Wisdom of Crowds: How the Many Are Smarter Than the Few." "Under the right circumstances," Surowiecki argues, "groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

Shaping the Next One Hundred Years

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 14:47:05 -0400

Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis
By Robert J. Lempert, Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes
Copyright 2003